More than 600,000 on Massachusetts Voter Rolls Had Died or Moved, Nonpartisan Analysis Discovered

(CNSNews.com) - Massachusetts had 116,483 dead people on its voter registration rolls and another 538,567 people who were no longer living at the addresses on their registrations, according to a study released Oct. 28, by Aristotle International Inc., a nonpartisan political technology and data firm.

Alicia Moran, a spokeswoman for Aristotle, told CNSNews.com on Monday that people should be cautious about drawing any conclusions from the company’s October analysis on the quality of the Massachusetts voter registration rolls going into Tuesday’s special U.S. Senate election, in which Democrat Martha Coakley and Republican Scott Brown are vying for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Democrat Ted Kennedy.

Moran noted that states, including Massachusetts, typically do end-of-the-year purges of their voter-registration rolls. Some states, but not Massachusetts, already have provided Aristotle with updated voter registration rolls.

“Massachusetts hasn’t released numbers to us, but other states have,” Moran said Monday.

The office of the secretary of state of Massachusetts was closed on Monday for the Martin Luther King holiday.

Aristotle did its study by comparing government lists of people who have moved or died with state voter registration rolls. The company has done a similar study of what it calls voter-registration “deadwood” every year since 2000.

The study that Aristotle released on Oct. 28 surveyed voter registrations in all 50 states. It found that Massachusetts ranked among the states having the worst problems with “deadwood” voters. “The states with the most ‘Deadwood’ on their rosters include: Washington, Wyoming, West Virginia, Massachusetts and New Hampshire,” the company said in an Oct. 28 press release.

"Some states have bigger problems than others," said Aristotle CEO John Aristotle Phillips at that time.